This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Overrated

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This is formula tough guy vs tough guy manhunt. It's based on an actual incident, and changed to meet Hollywood iconic stereotypes of godlike men.In truth, the real manhunt was for a vicious killer, resulting in a little bit of what we see on film. As far as "literary license" goes, this is not as bad as most movies. However, the real killer was a killer, and was caught.Here, Bronson plays a man wrongly accused, as suits Hollywood. Thanks to Hollywood, people now see fit to judge guilt based on how they feel about the person politically. That's changed a bit in the last ten years, but in the seventies and eighties, it was very racist.Bronson's character is likable, though. He does what he needs to survive. As a story on its own, if one wants to call it a fiction piece, it works very well. Lee Marvin is a good grunting sort of mountie who takes on the aristocratic sort of mountie rookie, the idealist so popular in this era, who would learn that grunting is better than being civilized.The real story comes with the supporting characters. Three in particular, who have a later rendezvous with destiny. An old trapper, and a pair of trappers who are low in the pecking order, one of them completely on the bottom, the other who bullies him around.It is a story mostly of the pecking order of bullies in the savage wilderness. That part is done fairly well. It could have been much worse.

Decent if unexceptional chase / survival thriller benefits from a solid cast, interesting characters, breathtaking scenery, and a compelling enough story, based on (or maybe the operative words should be "inspired by") history. The true story is touted as one of the most intense manhunts ever, and I am sure it would make for fascinating reading.Two legendary cinema tough guys play pursuer and the pursued; Charles Bronson is Albert Johnson, a solitary man forced to kill in self-defense. Lee Marvin is Edgar Millen, the Royal Canadian Mountie who is obliged to track him down, but who respects him far too much to want to see him bagged by a greed-motivated bounty hunter or an overly ambitious pilot.Ultimately, the movie doesn't deliver too much on the action front; the action scenes are certainly competent but there aren't too many of them, and we really don't get a sense of the characters having to endure any real hardships, despite the potentially riveting man vs. nature element of the story.Still, "Death Hunt" does manage to entertain well enough even if it's not terribly memorable in the end. Its period recreation is effective (the story takes place at the tail end of 1931 in Canada's Yukon Territory) and there are some great scenes and images. It's just too cool to see Bronson - in one of his better performances - emerge from the rubble of his destroyed cabin with both guns a-blazing. The music by Jerrold Immel and cinematography by James Devis are noteworthy, as well as a prominent male milieu, headed by greats Bronson and Marvin; Andrew Stevens is baby faced, by-the-book young Mountie Alvin, Carl Weathers the easygoing "Sundog", veteran screen heavy Ed Lauter the troublemaker Hasel, and an under utilized Angie Dickinson in an obligatory (and brief) love interest role. Lots of great character faces here, too: Henry Beckman, William Sanderson, Jon Cedar, Len Lesser, Richard Davalos, Maury Chaykin, August Schellenberg, Sean McCann, and Tantoo Cardinal. Chaykin and Schellenberg add silly comedy relief as two constantly bickering thugs.Overall, this is good stuff if not as great as it could and should have been. At least it's a good example of a thriller with a refreshingly old fashioned, straightforward appeal and which doesn't over saturate itself with special effects. It even works in a comment on the nature of tradition vs. progress, which in this story is represented by radios and aviation. All in all, it may give in to predictability rather than nuance, and not be too faithful to the true story, but it provides acceptable entertainment.Seven out of 10.

The production team had a very powerful true story to build upon, but they just tacked Bronson and Marvin in a loose adaptation and felt content with it. In the end, the biggest flaw of all is there's hardly a Death Hunt taking place. The whole picture fumbles with geographical continuity so much that suspense is never gaining momentum. Aerial shots of abrupt snowy slopes contrast with the ground shots where actors happen to run on a mostly flat soil, with little snow most of the time.Thus the chase looks more like a veteran's trekking in the mountains. Peter Hunt was supposed to be an innovative editor, but he constantly failed to prove he could edit pictures in his head to achieve remarkable results as a director. All the chase sequences feel disjointed, shot at various locations. Bronson is in sight, then he escapes, and then again he seems cornered by the Mountie posse soon joined by the improvised bounty hunters coming out of the wild, simply catching up with the unrelenting chase (ok Bronson is supposed to zigzag and the plane helps to locate him very closely, but little is done to make this a consistent narrative feature).Eventually it's a poor rendition of a fantastic true story only because the guys involved took the pedestrian path to a Death Hunt in the Arctic wilderness. The R-rated bullet impacts or the wasteful Angie Dickinson cameo are further evidence of a cheap-shots-oriented production.

If you can look past the legion of historical inaccuracies, you'll probably enjoy Death Hunt, a bringing together of Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, along with Angie Dickinson in a story of a wrongly-accused trapper harassed and chased by the RCMP and a posse made up of men, none of whom has an IQ above that of a pine tree.The 1931 story, filmed fifty years after the fiction (who would accuse the script of being factual?) showcases Marvin and Bronson at the near-end of their useful careers. Ol' Lee growls and grumbles at having to train a rookie Mountie (Andrew Stevens) and never cracks so much as a sweat. You can tell that he was informed to play his character as the caricature Lee Marvin (and not the vibrant and edgy Marvin of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cat Ballou, and Point Blank). What you get is an impression of Marvin, by Marvin.Bronson fares worst, simply because he's given nothing to do except look athletic and kill posse members. He's fascinating to watch, not because he says or does anything overly important, but because you keep hoping the Bronson of The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen will appear . . . and slap the sillies out of the bad guys.It never happens.Yet, Death Hunt is an entertaining, if lazy chase film. Considering the murderous inflation of the year it was shot (1980), DH looks genuine on the cheap. My quibbles are with the tight shots (to hide whatever anachronistic scenery couldn't be dealt with) and the overly-dramatic musical score.The next time it shows on AMC, catch it. The R-rated film comes to the little screen almost completely intact. I saw the movie on HBO back in the early eighties and my impression of what has been hacked out is just a few crudities and a boob or butt. The gory violence appears intact. The only reason I mention this is that if you sit down to watch this with your 13 year old or above kiddies, you won't have too much cringing to do.Not a bad two hours to blow, with a couple old friends named Marvin and Bronson!